The Consumerization of Learning

BOOK

The Consumerization of Learning

LeiLani is well versed in the digital learning object universe, software development, the adoption process, school curriculum, and technology coverage models, and she is helping define this century’s real change in teaching and learning.

She has over twenty-years’ experience in news media publishing, and market leadership in the high tech, education, and government industries. Nearly every week, she is on the road, meeting school superintendents and their staffs, telling them about the Learning Counsel’s national research and helping spread change.

It is time to go "all-in" with digital transition

and realize its true end-point. Containing studied

critiques and survival strategies, The Consumerization

of Learning is for every stakeholder in education.

“A breath of fresh air - it is a thought-provoking, visionary book that every educator - teacher, administrator and parent - must read. Change, as LeiLani describes it, is absolutely happening. Educators can join in... or be left behind.”—Dr. Elliot Soloway, College of Engineering, School of Information, School of Education, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

“A must-read for all change agents trying to help their teachers move from the lecturing mode to being facilitators of learning, using digital content and curriculum. The Consumerization of Learning captures all essential points in making these challenging transitions possible and effective as they significantly influence student achievement.”—Dr. Jasna Aliefendic, Coordinator of Technology Integration & Staff Development,Garland ISD

About the Book

The Consumerization of Learning is a deep dive into the disruption at hand for the way leaders lead education digitally. It highlights consumerization as the act of making something desirable and consumable by the individual. Educators like to think of this as the personalization of learning on computing screens using the capabilities of the software that make it intuitive and highly adaptive just for that learner. If schools fully discover and adapt to consumerization’s ingenuity, it has the power to give teachers back time spent custom building every digital resource themselves, time that can now be turned to attention on students, to create more hands-on learning activities, and to guide students in the fullness of a digital learning experience.

Consumerized learning is also an alternate delivery mechanism that has the potential to disintermediate on cost, immediacy, and effectiveness. It’s time for schools to take advantage of this shift and co-opt, with publishers, to transform education.

At the end of the book, LeiLani does something rarely seen as a way to view her suppositions and theories concerning the future of education – she provides a fictional story about the future to illustrate where things can go for students, teachers, and schools.

LeiLani continues to travel throughout the country, leading discussions and keynoting on the transition of education to digital curriculum.

Read this book and be part of the discussion about how schools

are finding a new relevancy at the natural end-point of digital

transition: maximized live experience and quality digital

learning, also known as “expo” education.

Sample Chapters

Book Quotes

“What I find so interesting in this is that my observations about the consumerization of learning is that it is an inevitability, not mere musings. Inevitable because consumer demand, industry marketing, and uninhibited access through the Internet are creating an unstoppable force.” Backstory, Chapter 2

“What’s indicated now in the Age of Experience is a virtual networked community administration similar to those that are already evident in other industries. For education, such a network would knit together the best subject experts, curate knowledge, and facilitate individual students to maneuver amongst the basics they must know and all else they want to know. And it should have an eye to the creation of real experiences, digitally and otherwise. It could be a placeless and virtually structure-less modality. Buildings would not be a key factor; telecommuting teachers is a high probability already working in some places just like tele-medicine.” Book 1, Chapter 11

“After the Design Age comes the Age of Experience. Schools will level-up from design to education-as-experience with online and physical interactions so artfully crafted together and personalized that the life-journey of the student will be mapped and adjusted with consummate ease.” Backstory, Chapter 2

“Mature markets always have a multiplicity of ‘fits’ rather than a one-dimensional answer.” Book 1, Chapter 6

“The problem with the economy where education is concerned perhaps isn’t a problem at all – it’s just that nearly every industry is moving into the Experience Economy while the education sector has largely been left behind. It has instead been filled with new requirements for endless testing and accommodations while not being reinvented to discard some of the earlier, now non-relevant things.” Book 1, Chapter 4

“Seeking simplicity and authenticity, without pretentiousness, is a hallmark of the new age. Schools who specialize in authoritarian and pretentious “we’re-the-only-source” and “without-us-you-don’t-get-a-degree or diploma or grade,” are already secretly shunned because they are interfering with the idea of just getting on with a rich experience of life. Like toll-takers, the requirements, the forced human interaction mimicking office visits and waiting lines of old for any business, and testing transactions may seem essential, but when technology makes them invisible and seamless, learners will have choice and a return of their desired time. They will judge an institution by how comfortable and well-managed they feel in the overall experience of learning.” Book 1, Chapter 4

“Accomplishing greater efficiency of time in learning, of authentic and not superficial experience, is the new level for schools to reach. To do it, they need to be maestros of digital, not dabblers.” Book 1, Chapter 4

“There are more than 7,000 publishers in the field, who are creating tens of millions of digital resources. You would have to be living in a cave to not see the writing on the wall. This is a sea of change for education.” Book 1, Chapter 5

“This war for balance is between the inside world of education and the outside world of every other part of the economy moving faster in technology adoption. The visible friction between the way schools run and their immediate community is another level of the war. Schools and district level administrations battling their Boards and finding funding sources for a shift to technology is another level of the war. Another level is with teachers trying to deploy, or fight, using technology in the classroom. The final level is a war for every single human – a war each of us have between being human and being entirely absorbed in technology. In the end the war is an attempt by humans to balance against the great force of technology, to use enough to be competitive and in-fashion, but to not let it take over everything and displace us.” Book 1, Chapter 7

“That new curriculum direction just may be the most exciting one of the 21st Century: how to compete as a human in a completely embedded technological world, using it, but providing a value above it to be employed and sustained. And, just one last cherry on top, employed in just such a way that way more free time enters the picture.” Book 1, Chapter 7

“The “cred” today is the exact opposite of previous generations. Instead of hoarding, they want to be the first to share and share it with the most people they can.” Book 1, Chapter 8

“With present structures, we aren’t necessarily causing people of different generations to learn together but that is in fact the way it was done for all of history until the last hundred or so years with the artificiality of grade levels and classes dividing people by age. Now, however, we have come far enough along in history to have a sense that those structures are not natural for humanity and have robbed us of something, just as a new trend of multi-generational living is on the upsurge nationally.” Book 1, Chapter 8

“The big “Why” is the unlooked-for issue, the one no one dare blame so we don’t even look – but ha! -- it’s technology infiltration, of course. The internet really does change everything.” Book 1, Chapter 9

“The technology villain may just also be the savior.” Book 1, Chapter 9

“A new education administrative ‘un-structure’ that is still a sort of structure, just not necessarily hierarchical and as bureaucratic as it has been, using a networked community administration and business intelligence systems as a more useful way to distribute education, seems like the natural next stage. It will be fully leveraging and using technology, not just teaching with it. Chaos and the “un-structure” is thusly enabled, given a “base” by technology that earlier ages did not have. Having a base is a requirement by theorists of Chaos Theory.” Book 1, Chapter 10

“What’s wrong with the current state of technology incursion into Education is actually that there is not enough of it in Education, and the not-enough-of-it is orders-of-magnitude above what is currently there. Most non-technical teachers and administrators cannot see what’s missing; they only see what is there now.” Book 1, Chapter 11

“Screen Learning is both in and outside the context of the classroom and teacher-learner paradigm. Screen Learning is also both simpler and more complex than other terms related to imbuing education with tech. It is learning built for the computing screen, that’s it. It doesn’t care where you are as a learner or if a teacher is even there, necessarily; although it doesn’t replace a teacher in every sense. It’s straight up built for the user.” Book 1, Chapter 13

“For several years, education has taken technology on at their front lines, in the teaching and learning arena. This is not thinking organizationally, seeing the finished product and how it will be arrived at from the top in the executive suites, like companies more typically do. It could be said that the thinking by education administrations so far has been with a preconception of delivery mechanism, via or at the teachers, and not even necessarily at the learners. It has been as if the identification of the target to change by the executives was their teacher delivery mechanism more than the structure with tech as delivery mechanism. Administrators seemed to have been considering the structure could all pretty much stay the same and only the troops needed to fight with some added attention from the back-office tech guys. This is not sufficient.” Book 2, Chapter 16

“Admittedly, the digital consumer user interface and user experience has a way to go. This is another constraint to change.” Book 2, Chapter 20”

“To ‘ungate’ in software is to allow a user to proceed to the next level or into a new section. In some software, gating is a way for teachers to lever up or hold back individual students so that they can surge forward if they are high achievers, or remain with a group.” Book 2, Chapter 22

“To teach, it is necessary to understand life to a degree. To teach when surrounded by technology innovation, it is even more necessary to understand what life is doing in order to enhance it to survive amongst machines and even compete with machines. Even if we don’t understand everything about our fellow humans, we can still admire them and love them. After all, humans have something we can call creative inception that ‘jumps the rails’ of direct linear code of machines, and works non-linearly to think.” Book 2, Chapter 23

“What’s being asked of schools is a metamorphosis into a new being, with new super-powers, including being equipped with knowledge about consumerized learning and what it means for them. What do they get out of it? Ideally, they get the magical ability to provide truly individualized learning automatically and gain back tons of free time, including time to pay attention to all the learners for real.” Book 2, Chapter 26

“I think the real challenge for education is the creation of both a virtual and real ‘theatre of experience,’ an Expo Center of Learning. This is because the environment is as much a knowledge as the subjects and topics taught in schools. When it is a compelling environment filled with projects and activities, it has relevancy in a time when a physical location is increasingly optional for learning delivery, especially when figured against consumerized learning.” Book 2, Chapter 27

“Expo centers of learning may be the cure of no-work where learning, creativity and organizing one’s human-ness become a new social imperative carried on indefinitely.“ Book 2, Chapter 27

“New roles and way more jobs in the education field are probable in the future.” Book 2, Chapter 28

Established in 2014, the Learning Counsel is the first mission-based organization to develop a thesis of education’s future based on converging tech and industry advances,and the first to start documenting real-life implementations in schools.

Learning Counsel is fundamentally a research institute and news media hub. We provide context for schools in digital transition from a deep understanding of tech user experience, systems, and organization. Our readers are comprised of 215,000 Superintendents, tech and instructional directors, curriculum specialists, thousands of publishers, tech companies and interested enthusiasts anywhere in the teaching and learning field.